"Open outer airlock doors, Mr. Garcia."

The drum thudded on. Martinez was suddenly aware of a furious itch below his right shoulder blade.

"Outer doors opened, my lord."

"Proceed, Mr. Garcia."

Ejecting the condemned into space was the matter of pressing a keypad. Martinez hoped they were

already dead. Garcia looked into the airlock through the little window, then turned back to Martinez.

"Airlock's clear, my lord."

"Close the outer door and repressurize. Lieutenant Mokgatle?"

Acting Lieutenant Mokgatle, who was blessed with an impressive reading voice, stepped forward from

the ranks of the officers and read from the service from the dead.

"Life is brief, but the Praxis is eternal," Mokgatle concluded. "Let us all take comfort and security in

the wisdom that all that is important is known."

He took a neat step back into ranks.

By now the condemned were stripped ions floating on the void. Martinez felt a moment of stillness

building around him. The prisoners had been condemned according to law and executed with all the majesty that the traditions of the Fleet could provide. Their comrades had been present, either in person or mustered to observe by video from the mess or from duty stations in the ship. They were witnesses to the fact that the executions had been conducted properly, just as they'd been witnesses to the larceny that had begun the series of deaths.

Mute witnesses, in both cases. The recruits hadn't been consulted when their own department heads had conspired to rob them, and they hadn't been consulted when Martinez had proved their guilt and Michi ordered their executions.

Maybe it was time they were taken into their superiors' calculations.

Lady Michi cleared her throat in a deliberate way, suggesting that she was tired of waiting for

something to happen.

Martinez took a step forward and turned to look at the camera that was recording the ceremony.

"The three condemned," he said, "and their partner Engineer Thuc, operated a gambling ring for

months, preying openly on the crew ofIllustrious . There is no record that any notice was taken of this,

or that anyone registered a complaint. Their activity led by degrees to theft, treason, and the murder of two officers, including the captain of this ship."

He looked into the camera and tried to imagine the scene in the mess, the crew standing braced behind their tables, watching the proceedings on the video walls. The mess, where the gamblers had plundered their comrades every night.

"All the deaths could have been prevented," Martinez said, "if a proper report of their activities had been made, and action taken. For some reason, everyone, even the victims, chose to keep silence.

"Perhaps the crew has not been properly encouraged to report wrongdoing to their officers. I would like to change that."

He took a deep breath. "I want to assure the ship's company that my door is now open to any reports the crew may wish to make. Any crew will be admitted to see their captain, on any matter they consider important." He glanced at the line of officers behind and to one side of him. "I trust that my officers will be similarly receptive." They shifted uneasily in their line.

He faced the camera again. "When Captain Fletcher executed Engineer Thuc, he said it was for the honor of the ship. He was right. Our ship's honor was being daily dragged through the mud by a criminal gang.Illustrious 's honor is far from restored, but I'll bedamned if I see it degraded any further."

Martinez paused, wondering if he hadn't said enough, or if he'd said too much.

He took his eyes off the camera, then looked at the crew standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the corridor outside the airlock.

"Dismissed," he said.

The crew broke ranks and shuffled away as the band began a slow, dirgelike rendition of "Our Thoughts Are Ever Guided by the Praxis," normally a brisk marching tune. Michi stepped up to him, drawing her gloves off her fingers.

"You've let yourself in for it," she said.

"I hope not," Martinez said.

"Every recruit coming to you with his problems. Every slacker on the ship asking you for money or time off." She shook her head. "You'll be buried in them."

"Maybe, but I'll share," Martinez said, with another glance at his officers. Michi grinned and marched away. Chandra, standing behind her, began to follow, then hesitated and approached Martinez.

"You just made the ship yours," she said. "Treat her well."

At the words, Martinez felt, somewhere behind his breastbone, a slow unfolding of pride.

"Thank you." He glanced around him, then leaned closer to Chandra. "I enjoyed your exercise in creative writing, by the way."

She didn't look the least embarrassed. "I thought I caught his style rather well."

"Too many adverbs," Martinez said. "I pruned them back."

The night before, he'd looked at the prisoners' personnel files and brought them up to date. While he had the files open, he'd decided to go into Chandra's file and remove the poisonous fitness report that Fletcher had written for her.

In the end Martinez had decided the report simply wasn't worthy of Fletcher. He didn't want Fletcher's last act to be the slagging of an officer against whom he'd had a grudge.

Opening the file, Martinez was surprised to find that someone else had already rewritten the report. The report now emphasized Chandra's mastery of all aspects of her profession and the captain's admiration for her talents and personality. Where Fletcher's conclusion had read, "Promotion is not indicated," the line was now "Promotion is enthusiastically indicated."

Martinez had removed the word "enthusiastically." And then he'd removed the extra user privileges he'd given Chandra before she got it into her head to rewrite anything else.

The Naxids took their parting shot at Chenforce the next day, four hundred missiles tearing into the system on their tail.

Because Michi had destroyed the wormhole stations that would have tracked Chenforce, the missiles weren't able to make last second corrections and had to do their own searching. Because targeting took time, the missiles weren't able to fly as fast as they had at Arkhan-Dohg. From the instant Chenforce first felt the touch of the targeting lasers, the squadron had nearly twenty-six minutes to prepare their response. Batteries of countermissiles were launched and every defensive weapon was deployed.

Chenforce performed flawlessly. Countermissiles destroyed most of the incoming warheads on the approach, and the rest were targeted by lasers and antiproton beams before they could close with the squadron. The closest was killed nearly two minutes out. The mood in Command throughout the combat was clinical. Even the applause at the destruction of the last incoming missile was restrained.

That was the last Chenforce heard from the Naxids. The squadron passed through one more enemy-controlled system without finding anything to shoot at, and then entered the nearly barren Enan-dal system through Wormhole 1.

Last they heard, both the station at Enan-dal Wormhole 1 and the station at Wormhole 2 were still controlled by the loyalists.

Martinez, suited and watching his displays, sat in Command while communications lasers pulsed queries to each station.

Wormhole Station 1 did not reply, which argued that the Naxids had occupied it. Michi sent a message informing them that they would be destroyed if they didn't respond, and as if in answer, a lifeboat, presumably with the station crew aboard, broke from the station and began a high-gravity sprint toward the wormhole. Michi ordered both the station and the lifeboat destroyed, as either could conceivably track the squadron for a barrage of missiles.

It would take ten hours for Michi's message to reach Station 2, and nearly ten hours for any response to return. After the first few hours, when it was clear that no Naxid force was lurking behind the system's swollen red sun, Michi reduced the squadron to a lower level of alert, and Martinez left Command with suspense still humming in his nerves.

The squadron had been out of communication for nearly four months, and during that time the cause for which they fought could have died. The Naxids could have won a crushing victory over the remnants of the Home Fleet, or the loyalist cause simply collapsed in the wake of the fall of Zanshaa. It was a matter of conjecture whether Chenforce would have a home to return to.

Martinez was in Command at the earliest possible hour that he could expect a reply from Wormhole Station 2. It was early in the morning, before his usual hour for rising, and he clutched a cup of coffee in one hand, sipping as he listened to the routine chatter.

"Message from Station Two, my lord!" The joy in Acting Lieutenant Qing's voice was answered by a leap of Martinez's heart. "The message is in the proper code for the day. Decoding now..."

A pale Daimong face, set in a frozen expression of horrified surprise, appeared on Martinez's displays.

"Welcome to Enan-dal, Lady Michi," the Daimong said. "I am Warrant Officer Kassup of the Exploration Service. We have been told to await you. Word of your arrival has already been sent to the Fleet. I am sending a digest of the latest news, and I will forward your mail and any instructions from the Fleet as soon as they arrive."

Martinez felt the easing of a tension he didn't know he had. He half listened to Michi's polite reply, then waited for a moment to see if she had any orders for him. She didn't.

Michi finished the report of her raid, with its account of the battles at Protipanu, Arkhan-Dohg, and Alekas, its lists of casualties, the status of her seven ships, the totals of enemy ships destroyed, the description of the ring's destruction at Bai-do, plus the details of the deaths of Captain Fletcher, two lieutenants, and four petty officers. The report was wrapped in several layers of cipher and sent to the Fleet Control Board by way of Station 2.

An instant later the crew's personal messages, already in the queue, were sent, and with these went Martinez's long serial letter to his wife Terza and shorter letters to his father, his mother, to his father-inlaw Lord Chen, and to the two sisters who were still speaking to him. He also sent his father a scan of his portrait.

Martinez wasn't needed. He returned command of the ship to Qing, went to his bed, and slept dreamlessly for many hours, well past his normal time for waking.

Alikhan, wisely, let him sleep.

Four days later Chenforce sped through Enan-dal Wormhole 2, and half a day later received its mail. Martinez gave the entire crew two hours free time to catch up with the news from home.

He took advantage of his own offer and retired to his office and shut the door. He opened his desk display and scanned the long list of mail. There was no communication from Caroline Sula. He hadn't expected anything, but managed to notice its absence anyway.

He wondered where she was and what she was doing.

Martinez looked for the very last item by date, sent eleven days earlier. It was a video file from Terza, and he opened it.

Lady Terza Chen was quite visibly pregnant now-nearly seven months, he calculated. She stood in the camera's range, draped in a long dark violet gown that emphasized the paler beauty of her face and of the hands that rested lightly on her pregnant belly. Her hair was long and black and worn in a pair of long tails, threaded with ribbon, that fell past her shoulders. Her lovely face bore the serenity that had always seemed slightly unreal to Martinez and had led to uneasy thoughts concerning what exactly was happening behind the tranquil mask.

With a shock he recognized where she was standing. It was a study in his family's palace on Laredo, the long, elegant building of white and chocolate marble that stood in the center of the capital. He recognized the hulking, scarred old shelves of dark wood, the equally battered light fixtures.

The room had once been his. The half-open door behind Terza led to the bedroom in which he'd slept until he left for the academy at the age of seventeen, the room to which he had never returned. His parents must have put Terza in his old room-it was just the sort of sentimental gesture that would have appealed to his mother.

Martinez hoped she wasn't too appalled by the old furniture, so badly knocked about by a houseful of active children.

And he maintained a devout wish that Terza would not discover the nude pictures of an old girlfriend, Lord Dalmas's daughter, that he'd hidden in the back of the wardrobe that summer before he left for the academy.

"Hello," Terza said. She turned to give a profile to the camera and smoothed the folds of her gown over the outline of her pregnant belly. "I thought I'd send a video so you could have an update on the status of your son."

Son.Martinez felt his heart give a lurch. That the child was a boy hadn't been clear when Chenforce had departed for its raid.

"He's becoming rather an active child," Terza said, "and is growing fond of exploration. We've been considering names, and in light of his conduct and in the absence of any instructions from the father, we've decided we rather like Gareth." She turned to face the camera, a slight smile on her face. "I hope you approve."

"As long as they don't called him Junior," Martinez found himself saying aloud, but he felt a warm surge of pride flush through his blood.

Terza drew back a chair from the battered old desk, rearranged her gown again, and sat. The camera, which was not without its own intelligence, followed her.

"As you can see," she said, "I'm still on Laredo. Your parents and Roland"-the brother Martinez wasn't speaking to, at least not when he could help it-"are dealing with, ah, a great many important guests, who are going to be feted and celebrated and generally fussed over until they give Roland and your father what they want."

The very important guests, Martinez knew, were the members of the Convocation, which had fled Zanshaa for a world as far away from the Naxids as they could find. Their location was a state secret- though presumably everyone on Laredo knew-and Terza couldn't mention them by name without triggering one of the algorithms at the Office of the Censor, which might have stopped the correspondence dead.

In any case, the Convocation was now completely in the hands of Lord Martinez, Roland, and the rest of the family. If their incompetence hadn't caused the war in the first place, Martinez would have felt sorry for them.

"I've been playing my part as a kind of auxiliary hostess," Terza said, "which is less tiresome than you'd think, and gives me something to do other than languish in the nursery. I've known many of these guests all my life. And since my father isn't here, I'm handling Chen business as well as representingyou, though it's hard to say at this point how any of that's going."

Martinez paused the video and wondered why Lord Chen wasn't present along with the rest of the Convocation. Terza wasn't in mourning, and she didn't seem sorrowful when she spoke of him, so he wasn't dead or somehow disgraced.

Perhaps he was on a mission of some sort.

Probably that information was on one of the communiques he'd skipped. Martinez triggered the video again.

Terza gave him a significant look. "I obviously can't go into details," she continued, "but I've been around some important people, and I've seen some interesting reports. The material side of the war is encouraging, and time is not on the Naxids' side."

She raised a hand. "I hope you're raising a lot of mischief but otherwise staying out of trouble. Come back to me and young Gareth as soon as you can."

The orange end-stamp appeared on the screen. Martinez stared at it, his mind swimming.

She had decided to name their son after him. Perhaps that meant she was thinking of remaining in the marriage even after her father and his enterprises ceased to require a massive Martinez subsidy.

Perhaps the woman his family had bought for him, and with whom he'd spent all of seven days before being parted by the war, had decided to remain a fixture in his life.

His sleeve comm chimed. He answered, and saw the chameleon weave on his sleeve resolve into Michi's image.

"Yes, my lady?"

"I thought I'd let you know that we've just received orders to head for Chijimo. That's where we were told to rendezvous with the Home Fleet in our original orders."